There’s certain questions that ninjas ask but don’t really know the answer to on a daily basis. Furthermore, there is a whole wealth of questions that aren’t asked, that should most definitely be answered. In that spirit, I now present to you: A Day of Quandaries.

For our first question we ask, how old is Vanna White? These hosts and hostesses seem to last forever, and maintain their beauty the whole time.

When I asked my boy O this question he responded with an "I don’t care, because I’d still hit it." But let’s be honest. How old is she really? She doen’t look a day over 30. Vanna White is a stunning bout-to-be 51 years old. She’s been turning letters since she was in her 20′s and certainly turning heads since before that (erm..). This begs the question, how does she still look so young.

You thought we’d never get back to this, didn’t you? Yeah we’ve been covering this ninja ever since he got accused of defrauding the government. Last time we talked about him he was hiding out in Namibia (like a true ninja) a country without an extradition treaty with the U.S. Entertainment Weekly had an interesting article about him near the end of December, which was purportedly his first attempt to "speak out" about the charges. As an answer to the question, well, nothing.

For much of the past decade, Snipes has been mired in one legal scandal and publicity nightmare after another. Some of these were due to bad luck. Others seem to have been the result of bad judgment. And yet others, like the federal tax-fraud indictment Snipes currently faces, are so convoluted and downright bizarre that it’s hard to figure out who’s to blame.

Snipes has remained silent through it all. He’s sat by as his reputation has taken devastating hits and offers from the major Hollywood studios have dried up. He’s allowed other people to unspool the strange details of his once charmed life in the press. And considering his silence, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that maybe those rumors and accusations against him were true.

But on a wintry morning last month at his home in suburban New Jersey, Snipes finally agreed to talk. The only question is whether it’s too late. After all, Snipes’ career isn’t the only thing that’s in jeopardy. His freedom is too. Because next month, Snipes will stand before a jury that may convict him and send him to prison for 16 years.

Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and Ann Dunh am, a white ATHEIST from Wichita, Kansas. Obama’s parents met at the University of Hawaii.

Barack Hussein Obama (Senator Obama’s father) was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in Alego, Kenya. He met and married an American woman, Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas, while they were both attending the University of Hawaii. Their son, also named Barack Hussein Obama was born on 4 August 1961 at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Although the elder Obama was raised as a Muslim, no evidence supports the claim that he was ever a "radical Muslim," and Senator Obama’s family histories note that his father was an atheist or agnostic (i.e., no longer a practicing Muslim) by the time he married the younger Obama’s mother. Of his mother’s religious views, Senator Obama wrote:

For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.

This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many not necessarily the best way that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.

In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.

I hope you all are up on your Chinese Zodiac game!AA It’s the year of the rat in this piece.AA In other news, well, uh…AA Did any of you read that book Jackie Robinson and the year of the Boar when you were little?AA I read it in third grade but it’s stuck with me ever since.

The "Rat" is the first sign of the chinese zodiac.

Legend has it that the Jade Emperor invited the animals for a party. The first 12 to arrive was the Rat, followed by the Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and lastly, the Pig. All the animals were named after the 12-year cycle that governs Chinese life thereafter.

Various versions of the Rat’s story are particularly revealing about his character.

One version has it that, towards the end of the journey, the animals had to cross a celestial river, and the Rat asked the Ox to ferry him across. When they arrived on the other side, the Rat jumped down off the Ox’s head and that’s how gained first spot in the order of the Chinese zodiac.

This is an excerpt from an excellent article by John Hockenberry, recommended by a friend, which also includes a brief description of the "Cherry Blossoms" project, pictured below.AA I’ll tell you like a ninja told me, it’s long but worth it.

Advertisers were aggressive in their use of new technologies long before network news divisions went anywhere near them. This is exactly the opposite of the trend in the 1960s and ’70s, when the news divisions were first adopters of breakthroughs in live satellite and video technology. But in the 1990s, advertisers were quick to use the Internet to seek information about consumers, exploiting the potential of communities that formed around products and brands. Throughout the time I was at the network, GE ads were all over NBC programs like Meet the Press and CNBC’s business shows, but they seemed never to appear on Dateline. (They also had far higher production values than the news programs and even some entertainment shows.) Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and N.W.A were already major cultural icons; grunge and hip-hop were the soundtrack for commercials at the moment networks were passing on stories about Kurt Cobain’s suicide and Tupac Shakur’s murder.

Meanwhile, on 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney famously declared his own irrelevance by being disgusted that a spoiled Cobain could find so little to love about being a rock star that he would kill himself. Humor in commercials was hip-subtle, even, in its use of obscure pop-cultural references-but if there were any jokes at all in news stories, they were telegraphed, blunt visual gags, usually involving weathermen. That disjunction remains: at the precise moment that Apple cast John Hodgman and Justin Long as dead-on avatars of the PC and the Mac, news anchors on networks that ran those ads were introducing people to multibillion-dollar phenomena like MySpace and Facebook with the cringingly naAAve attitude of "What will those nerds think of next?" [LINK]

Businesspeople with good hearts looking to make a difference usually start with three questions: "How can I give back?" "How do I pick a good cause?" and "What skills should I contribute?" But the businesspeople I've met who have made the biggest contribution usually started with a different question: "What can I get?" As a result, they engage more deeply, contribute more of their skills, and do so for longer duration. #cause

--06.10.2012--

It is thus flawed, a weightless, overly romantic attempt at economic analysis, special only in that it is not an entirely boring read. #weightless

--06.10.2012--

Are nature and spirituality compatible, are they aloof colleagues, indifferent and incurious about what the other is saying? #physics

--06.10.2012--

I'm not entirely sure what literary fiction is "supposed" to be...but it is something that we can recognize when we read it, and in terms of speculative stories, it's a suggestion of internal struggle. #weird

Scientists published their work in journals that only scientists read, classicists in volumes that only classicists read, and engineers in blue books that no one read. So the reference book was born---the compendium of facts, the chrestomathy of passages, and the anthology of extracts---by which the rest of us could learn and use the information that print technology was producing, filling bookshelves that could be measured by the mile. #wikipedia